December, 2014

MICHAEL MOORCOCK, who has recently turned 75 is one of my literary heroes partly because he started writing pulp — he wrote some Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiches to start out and, as I recall, he said he wrote them on amphetamine! Like, a novel a week! But he soon got over that writing habit (I think he switched to pots of tea) and went on to write more resonant pulp / genre works, like the Elric books, and innovative works like the Jerry Cornelius books and the Dancers at the End of Time series–a favorite of mine. He helped launch the important New Wave in science fiction and as editor he re-launched the very influential magazine New Worlds. He wrote a fine award winning novella that atheists should prize: Behold the Man. . . And then he made the leap into big serious fantasy and historical fiction crossovers with a political slant and began to be taken seriously by mainstream critics. The fact that he could make this journey delights me. “He’s one who escaped the ghetto”. (When I was a mere stripling of a science fiction writer I heard many sf writers grumble about the science-fiction / fantasy “ghetto” in publishing). But even now he will also write his artful pulp when he chooses.

When I was young I corresponded a bit with Moorcock. The letters were lost in one of my many moves (unless one of my exes has them?) …I remember he said, after reading my first two novels, “I see that, like me, you write on adrenaline.” Yes indeed. Anyway, he was not only kind to me he was inspirational to me.

And he and I are members of a small exclusive club: writers who have written lyrics for the Blue Oyster Cult! He wrote songs like Black Blade and Veteran of the Psychic Wars for them…

I do admire Elric still and I once pitched some ideas for an Elric movie to Paramount…they never got around to making it with any writer. Probably couldn’t get past the albino thing… I wanted to have Val Kilmer (who was young then) play him in white makeup and with contact lenses…

We’re in the midst of an epidemic of heroin addiction in the USA. It’s increased 50 percent in the last four years. Where’d it come from? A pharmaceutical company called Purdue created Oxycontin, and pushed it for every little ache, and downplayed its opiate addictive qualities. Whereas it turned out to be hugely addictive. Problems arose, and the government made it harder to get. People addicted to Oxy and other painkillers–pills which had been pushed by manufacturers and doctors as Oxy had–turned to heroin. Word got out that here was a big market, in small towns and suburbs, for heroin. Dealers proliferated to answer the demand. I know a lot of people who were hurt by this. And not enough is being done to help them.

Essentially, they were victimized by pharmaceutical companies and irresponsible doctors. It really is not their fault. So why aren’t we helping them?

And if they haven’t sued them already–these victims should mount class action lawsuits against Purdue pharmaceuticals.

“Whoaaa,” said Stoner Stan, sitting beside Steve on his ash-dusted sofa, “No way! My old man was into that Bible shit. I said, ‘Those Muslims and those Hindus, they got holy books, what’s wrong with those. He kicked me out for a week. That shit was cold, man!”

“Bruh, okay, here’s the thing, just because it’s bullshitty myth faked up shit doesn’t mean there’s not, like, seeds and stems of truth. Like, Noah–maybe there was a guy who was watching the weather, and he had some almanac shit going on, and he got real high and had a hallucination talk with his own brain and thought God was telling him to build a boat so he built a pretty big boat and put all his farm animals, like his goats and sheeps and turkeys and shit on it, and maybe a couple burros, and some of his peeps too, and the flood came and drowned a buncha people in the villages around there–you know, like it was some local shit but to those fuckers, that was the world–and he didn’t get his peeps and his farm animals drowned because of his boat and it got dumped on that one mountain down kinda low and the rest was a lot of made-up shit. Like when Lanny takes shrooms and says space aliens pick her up.”

“I guess, bruh but–”

“And that Moses dude, it’s like, he was this Hebrew guy stuck in Egypt with some of his people and asked the Pharoah, Yo man let us go back to, like, Israel and the guy said fuck off. So then Moses prayed and it they had different food to eat than the Egyptians and they Egyptians got food poisoning but the Hebrews didn’t and maybe some kinda grasshopper infestation came in, and it was some coincidence shit. And the Pharoah said whatevas, leave then, so Moses took his peeps outta Egypt but then the Pharoah said no fuck this and sent his soldiers but there was some tidal shit going on because the moon was close so it blocked off the soldiers from following and it seemed like a miracle. And it was all just the roll of the dice stuff. But it got made into a big fucking story. Oh and then Moses and his peeps got lost in the desert a couple years and they ate that gooey stuff from that Tamarisk tree they called manna and then Moses got sick of wandering and saw a nice village and he like hallucinated the lord told him go in there and kill them all and take their shit and he did, he killed almost all the people and enslaved the other ones–”

“He did that? Fucked up!”

“Oh yeah, Moses had his peeps murder a lot of other people’s peeps. It’s in the book of Numbers.”

“Speaking of that–you want to smoke another number?”

“In a second. So anyway, there’s Jesus, he was real but he was just this pretty good guy, though he could be a dick too, and he was kinda crazy-ass figuring that he was the messiah and he was really smart and he got crucified but all that other shit about him was made up. But here’s the thing–Noah, that was like a message, don’t do bad shit or bad shit will happen and good people’ll be cool but what goes around comes around for the bad people. And Moses it was like, have faith, yo, and don’t give up and wait for your chance and the ten commandments, that shows people got to have rules.”

“But you said Moses was a murdering dickhead.”

“Nobody perfect, dude. And the Jesus thing is, like, turn the cheek and do unto others as you’d have em do and shit. So they make up the myths out of a little bit of stuff that maybe happened so they can try to tell people to stop like being dicks and shit.”

“Steve how come you know all this shit?”

“Oh I got an Masters in comparative religion, man. Hadda do something in school. Hey–Lanny left some shrooms!”

“Let’s do ‘em!”

One hour later. “Steve–what you staring at out the window? You’re talking to something out there! You’re trippin balls!”

“Dude! That bush outside the window’s on fire! But it ain’t burning up! And it’s talking to me!”

It’s always more complex than you think it is. International affairs–even the absurd kind. I reacted with somewhat kneejerk irascibility to the news that the comedy film The Interview was not going to be released due to North Korean threats. I was howling about our first amendment rights being trampled by dictatorial foreigners–but I had forgotten one key factor. Sony is based primarily in Japan–headquartered in Kōnan Minato, Tokyo.

Japan has a history with the Koreas and Japan is a neighbor to North Korea, with only the relatively dainty Sea of Japan in between. A threat to Sony can be carried out in Japan fairly easily, with operatives or long range weaponry. North Korea claims to have missiles that can reach Japan. North Korea’s leader may not be quite sane. His dad was certainly crazy as a grasshopper on PCP. So that’s probably a lot of the calculation–and it’s not just about American media and threats to us. So the decision might’ve been made on *that* basis. They’re not all that worried about the USA’s first amendment.

So maybe I was more or less wrong, in practicality if not in principle. I’ll see the movie (only because the North Koreans don’t want me to) when it is, inevitably, leaked online.

UPDATE: Sony’s putting the film out in limited release so I guess they grew some balls. Or one ball anyway.

If you get a big package of sadness in the mail, or perhaps the package is left for you to find in the house, and you mistakenly open it–why, there it is. It sticks to you, and it penetrates your skin. Then you feel it living in you.

You can try to squeeze it out and put it somewhere. But where do you put sadness? You can feel it in the cabinet, every time you pass it. Also, it whispers to you. Same for the attic, when you pass under that spot. The basement–no, you can smell it seeping up between the boards. You feel it in your feet. They go spottily numb; it climbs up your legs.

Bury it in the backyard? Something will grow, there, from the place sadness was buried. Something will grow huge and overshadow your house and shed sticky seeds on it, and on your land. And from those…

You can try to drop it in the sea, but all water is connected. Won’t it come back that way? Anyway, there’ll only be another package left for you. And you don’t really have to open it–shortly, it unwraps itself.

You can try not to identify with it, and step back from it, but it almost feels like a betrayal of your soul. There’s a reason for sadness, after all. But where do you *put* sadness? In a facebook post? In a book? I sometimes put it in books. But it won’t stay there long.

If a sufficiently potent Independent politician were to run for President, he or she could win, as an Independent. (Bernie Sanders is great but I’m not sure he’s charismatic enough and he’s rather elderly for a Presidential candidate.) People grind their teeth over our supposed two party system but in fact there are lots of political parties, and there’s Independent. There is no “Independent Party” as such; there’s American Independent Party but that’s a thankfully obscure far-right theocratic bozo pack of fantasists.

Perhaps an Independent Party or a Progressive Party should be started. There’s already a progressive party of sorts, the Green Party, but it has fumbled so much and has been so fixated on rigid rhetoric that it has lost credibility except in very small elections.

It would about getting enough support for a truly impressive candidate. The Democratic Party leadership would oppose supporting an Independent no matter how admirable. But if I thought there was an Independent along the lines of Sanders who had a decent chance of winning, I’d vote for them. Normally I’m a hidebound Democrat, because that fits with the idea of pragmatic progressivism (the art of the possible?) which I have embraced. But I think lots of Democrats would defect to a really inspiring Independent. And the category is taken fairly seriously.

A new Progressive Party could at first support progressive candidates in the Democratic party, or declared Independents. It would be like caucusing in campaigns. Then it could build up its status, and support, and field its own party’s candidates.

One problem with this is the electoral college which seems to support the two party system. But it can be worked around–or changed. A really Independent progressive party would generate such hope it might bring a sweeping flood of changes with it.